In a Time of Monsters: Travels Through a Middle East in Revolt

Returning to the UK in September 2010 after serving in Iraq as the political adviser to the top American general, Emma Sky felt no sense of homecoming. She soon found herself back in the Middle East traveling through a region in revolt.In a Time of Monstersbears witness to the demands of young people for dignity and justice during the Arab Spring; the inability of sclerotic regimes to reform; the descent of Syria into civil war; the rise of the Islamic State; and the flight of refugees to Europe. With deep empathy for its people and an extensive understanding of the Middle East, Sky makes a complex region more comprehensible. A great storyteller and observational writer, Sky also reveals the ties that bind the Middle East to the West and how blowback from the West's interventions in the region contributed to the British vote to leave the European Union and to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

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A note about the author
Emma Sky is a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute. She worked in the Middle East for twenty years and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services in Iraq. Her first book, The Unravelling, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orwell Prize and the CFR Arthur Ross Book Award. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Index
Abadi, Nasier and Saad, ref1f, ref2, ref3
Abbas, Mahmoud, ref1
Abbasid Caliphate (750–1517), ref1, ref2f
Abdel-Rahman, Omar, ref1
Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, King of Saudi Arabia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Abdullah I, King of Jordan, ref1
Abdullah II, King of Jordan, ref1
Abu Jihad, ref1
Afghanistan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15f
Akayev, Askar, ref1
Alawites, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Alexander the Great, ref1, ref2
Algeria, ref1
Allawi, Ayad, ref1, ref2
Alwash, Azzam, ref1ff, ref2ff
Ammar, Rachid, ref1
Annan, Kofi, ref1f
Arafat, Yasser, ref1f, ref2
Armenia, Armenians, ref1, ref2f, ref3
Asquith, Dominic, ref1ff, ref2ff
al-Assad, Asma, ref1
al-Assad, Bashar, ref1, ref2, ref3f, ref4, ref5f, ref6f, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10f, ref11f, ref12, ref13, ref14f, ref15
al-Assad, Bassel, ref1
al-Assad, Hafez, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
al-Assad, Riad, ref1
al-Assad, Rifaat, ref1
al-Assi, Ghassan, ref1ff
Atambayev, Almazbek, ref1
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, ref1, ref2
al-Azhar Mosque and University, ref1ff, ref2
Awakening, ref1f, ref2, ref3
Azmi, Zakaria, ref1
Baath Party, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Bahrain, ref1, ref2
Bakiyev, Kurmanbek, ref1
Balfour Declaration (1917), ref1f
Baluchs, ref1
Bangladesh, ref1, ref2, ref3
al-Banna, Hassan, ref1
Barzani, Masoud, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
al-Bashir, Omar, ref1
Belgium, ref1, ref2
Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, ref1, ref2, ref3ff, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Benin, ref1
Biden, Joseph, ref1, ref2
Bin Laden, Osama, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Blair, Anthony ‘Tony’, ref1f
Bosnia and Herzegovina, ref1ff
Bouazizi, Mohamad, ref1, ref2f
Bourguiba, Habib, ref1, ref2
Bracey, Carl, ref1ff
British Council, ref1, ref2
Brydon, William, ref1
Bush, George Herbert Walker, ref1, ref2
Bush, George Walker, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Butte-Dahl, Jen, ref1, ref2
Cameron, David, ref1, ref2
Charles, Prince of Wales, ref1
Charlie Hebdo attack (2015), ref1
Chilcot Inquiry (2009–11), ref1, ref2ff
China, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Christianity, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4ff, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14ff
Churchill, Winston, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Clinton, Hillary, ref1, ref2
Clinton, William ‘Bill’, ref1
Clooney, George, ref1
Cohen, Leonard, ref1, ref2
Conolly, Arthur, ref1
Corbyn, Jeremy, ref1
Cox, Helen Joanne ‘Jo’, ref1ff
Croatia, ref1, ref2, ref3ff, ref4
Czech Republic, ref1
Dakhil, Vian, ref1
Dalida, ref1
Dawa, ref1, ref2, ref3
Denmark, ref1, ref2
Derhagopian, Krikor, ref1ff
Domingo, Plácido, ref1
Druze, ref1
Egypt, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5ff, ref6, ref7, ref8ff
Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, ref1
Ennahda, ref1f, ref2
Erdoǧan, Recep Tayyip, ref1ff, ref2, ref3
European Union, ref1, ref2, ref3f, ref4, ref5ff, ref6, ref7ff, ref8, ref9
Faisal I, King of Iraq and Syria, ref1, ref2
Faisal II, King of Iraq, ref1
Fallon, William Joseph, ref1
Farage, Nigel, ref1, ref2, ref3
Farouk, King of Egypt, ref1
Finland, ref1
Fleming, Peter, ref1
Foley, James, ref1
Fong, Rebecca, ref1, ref2
Ford, Robert, ref1ff, ref2, ref3, ref4
France, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5ff, ref6, ref7ff
Francis, Pope, ref1f
Free Syrian Army (FSA), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Freedman, Lawrence, ref1, ref2
Gaddafi, Muammar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Germany, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4f, ref5, ref6, ref7
Ghannouchi, Rached, ref1f
Ghazi, King of Iraq, ref1
Ghonim, Wael, ref1, ref2
Gilbert, Martin, ref1
Gordon, Charles George, ref1, ref2
Gramsci, Antonio, ref1
Greece, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4ff
Hadi, Abdrabbuh Mansur, ref1f
Haines, David, ref1
Hammurabi, ref1
Hariri, Rafic, ref1
Harvard University, ref1, ref2
al-Hashimi, Tareq, ref1, ref2
Hawramy, Fazel, ref1ff, ref2
Hemingway, Ernest, ref1
Henning, Alan, ref1
Hezbollah, ref1, ref2
Hitler, Adolf, ref1, ref2
Hollande, François, ref1f
Holocaust, ref1, ref2, ref3
Holtz, Greta, ref1f, ref2ff, ref3, ref4
Hopkirk, Peter, ref1
Hulagu Khan, ref1f, ref2
Hungary, ref1, ref2
Hussein ibn Ali, ref1, ref2
Hussein, King of Jordan, ref1, ref2
Hussein, Saddam, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
Hussein, Sharif of Mecca, ref1, ref2
Ibn Abbas, Qusam ref1
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Mohamed, ref1
Ibn Battuta, ref1, ref2
Ibn Khaldun, ref1
Ibn Saud, Mohamed, ref1, ref2
Ibn Sina, ref1
Ibn Tulun, Ahmad, ref1f
India, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
International Criminal Court, ref1
International Monetary Fund (IMF), ref1
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), ref1, ref2, ref3
Iran, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10f, ref11
and Iraq, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4f, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9ff, ref10, ref11
Islamic Revolution (1979), ref1, ref2
and Kurds, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4ff
and Oman, ref1f
and Saudi Arabia, ref1ff
and Syria, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5f, ref6
Iraq, ref1f, ref2, ref3, ref4ff, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8ff, ref9, ref10, ref11f
Anfal Campaign (1986–9), ref1, ref2
Awakening, ref1f, ref2, ref3
Gulf War (1990–91), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), ref1
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), ref1, ref2, ref3f, ref4ff, ref5f, ref6, ref7f
Shaaban Intifada (1991), ref1
US-led war (2003–11), ref1ff, ref2ff, ref3, ref4, ref5ff, ref6, ref7, ref8ff, ref9f, ref10ff, ref11, ref12f, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17ff, ref18ff
Islamic Relief, ref1
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), ref1, ref2, ref3f, ref4ff, ref5f, ref6, ref7, ref8f
Israel, ref1, ref2f, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8f, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
al-Issawi, Rafi, ref1ff, ref2
Italy, ref1, ref2
al-Jaberi, Jaber, ref1f, ref2ff
Jabhat al-Nusra, ref1
al-Jabouri, Abdullah, ref1
Jamaica, ref1
Japan, ref1
Järvenpää, Minna, ref1f
Jaysh al-Mahdi, ref1
al-Jazeera, ref1f, ref2, ref3, ref4
Jenkins, John and Nancy, ref1ff, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5ff
Jerusalem, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Jewish people, ref1, ref2f, ref3, ref4f, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11f
Jihadi John, ref1
John Paul II, Pope, ref1, ref2
John the Baptist, ref1, ref2
Johnston, Rachel, ref1f
Jolie, Angelina, ref1
Jordan, ref1ff
Juaidi, Mike, ref1
Juncker, Jean-Claude, ref1
Karimov, Islam, ref1ff
al-Kasasbeh, Muath, ref1
Kassig, Peter, ref1
Kepel, Gilles, ref1
Khalilzad, Zalmay Mamozy, ref1
Khan, Abdul Qadeer, ref1
Khan, Sadiq, ref1, ref2
Khayam, Omar, ref1
Khomeini, Ruhollah, ref1, ref2
King’s College London, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Kitchener, Herbert, ref1f, ref2
Korea, ref1
Korski, Daniel, ref1f
Kosnett, Phil, ref1f
Kosovo, ref1, ref2
Kurdi, Alan, ref1
Kurds, Kurdistan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4ff, ref5, ref6, ref7ff, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
Kuwait, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Kyrgyzstan, ref1ff, ref2
Lamb, Graeme, ref1, ref2, ref3ff
Lawrence, Thomas Edward, ref1
League of Arab States, ref1
Lebanon, ref1, ref2, ref3
Libya, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
Luckham, Chris, ref1
Lyne, Roderic, ref1
Macedonia, ref1, ref2ff
Mackenzie, Colin, ref1
Maclean, Fitzroy, ref1
Mahdist War (1881–99), ref1f, ref2
Mahfouz, Naguib, ref1
Maillart, Ella, ref1
Mali, ref1, ref2
al-Maliki, Nuri, ref1, ref2, ref3ff, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
el-Materi, Sakher, ref1
Maude, Stanley, ref1
McChrystal, Stanley, ref1
McMahon, Henry, ref1
Mecca, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Merabet, Ahmed, ref1
Merkel, Angela, ref1
Mohamad, Prophet of Islam, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Mongol Empire (1206–1368), ref1f, ref2f, ref3f
Morocco, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Morsi, Mohamad, ref1, ref2ff
Mubarak, Hosni, ref1, ref2f, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6f, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
Murray, Craig, ref1
Muslim Brotherhood
Egypt, ref1, ref2, ref3ff, ref4, ref5, ref6
Iraq, ref1
Jordan, ref1
Qatar, ref1
Syria, ref1, ref2, ref3
al-Mutlaq, Saleh, ref1
Naguib, Mohamad, ref1
Nasrullah Khan, Emir of Bukhara, ref1f
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Netanyahu, Benjamin, ref1
New York, United States, ref1, ref2
Nigeria, ref1
al-Nil, Hamed, ref1
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
al-Nour Party, ref1, ref2
Obama, Barack, ref1, ref2ff, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9ff, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13
Öcalan, Abdullah, ref1, ref2, ref3
Odierno, Raymond Thomas, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Oman, ref1ff
Orbán, Viktor, ref1
Orwell, George, ref1, ref2
Osborne, George, ref1
Ottoman Empire (1299–1923), ref1f, ref2, ref3, ref4f, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
Oxford University, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Özçelik, Murat, ref1ff
Pakistan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4f, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Palestine, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4f, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8f, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13f
Parker, Harry, ref1f, ref2
Paris attacks (2015), ref1
Pásztory, Clarisse, ref1, ref2f
Peace Corps, ref1, ref2, ref3
Petraeus, David, ref1, ref2, ref3
Pitt, Brad, ref1
Poland, ref1
Portugal, ref1
Prashar, Usha, ref1
Putin, Vladimir, ref1, ref2
Qaboos bin Said, Sultan of Oman, ref1f, ref2f, ref3
al-Qaeda, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11ff, ref12, ref13
Qasim, Qais, ref1f
Qatar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Qutb, Sayyid, ref1f
Rabin, Yitzhak, ref1f
Rashidun Caliphate (632–61), ref1
refugees, ref1f, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5ff, ref6f, ref7ff, ref8, ref9, ref10
Ricks, Tom, ref1
al-Rifai, Ahmad, ref1
Roman Empire, ref1, ref2, ref3
Roosevelt, Franklin, ref1
Roy, Olivier, ref1
Rubin, Alissa, ref1
Rushdie, Salman, ref1
Russia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8f, ref9, ref10, ref11f, ref12, ref13
Rwanda, ref1
Saadi, Majid Ahmed, ref1f
Sadat, Anwar, ref1
al-Sadr, Muqtada, ref1, ref2
Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), ref1
Sahwa, ref1f, ref2, ref3
Said bin Taimur, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, ref1
Said, Khaled, ref1f
Salafism
Egypt, ref1f, ref2, ref3, ref4
and Islamic State, ref1, ref2
Kyrgyzstan, ref1
quietism, ref1, ref2, ref3
Saudi Arabia, ref1, ref2
Syria, ref1, ref2, ref3
Tunisia, ref1, ref2
Saleh, Ali Abdullah, ref1, ref2
Saleh, Raed, ref1
Salih, Barham, ref1f, ref2, ref3
Salih, Tayeb, ref1
Samanid Empire (819–999), ref1
Saudi Arabia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7ff, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13f
Savitsky, Igor, ref1
Sayigh, Yezid, ref1, ref2
September 11 attacks (2001), ref1, ref2f
Serbia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Sharia, ref1, ref2, ref3
Shashoua, Stephen, ref1ff
al-Sheikh, Safa, ref1ff, ref2ff
Shia Islam
Afghanistan, ref1, ref2
Bahrain, ref1
Iran, ref1, ref2f, ref3
Iraq, ref1, ref2, ref3ff, ref4, ref5ff, ref6f, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10f, ref11ff, ref12
and Islamic State, ref1ff, ref2, ref3, ref4
Lebanon, ref1, ref2
Saudi Arabia, ref1, ref2f
Syria, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Shire, Warsan, ref1
Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, ref1, ref2ff
Sierra Leone, ref1
Simeon the Younger, ref1f
Sinai, ref1
al-Sisi, Abdul Fatah, ref1f
al-Sistani, Ali, ref1f
Slovakia, ref1
Slovenia, ref1, ref2
Sotloff, Steven, ref1
South Korea, ref1
South Sudan, ref1, ref2, ref3
Soviet Union, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Spain, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4ff
Stalin, Joseph, ref1, ref2
Stevens, Chris, ref1
Stewart, Rory, ref1ff
Stoddart, Charles, ref1f
Stone, Elizabeth, ref1f
Sudan, ref1, ref2ff, ref3, ref4
Suez, Egypt, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Sufism, ref1f ref2f, ref3
Sunni Islam, ref1, ref2
Bahrain, ref1
Iraq, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4ff, ref5, ref6, ref7ff, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13ff, ref14ff, ref15f
and Islamic State, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Saudi Arabia, ref1ff
Syria, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5f, ref6
Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916), ref1, ref2f
Syria, ref1, ref2f, ref3, ref4, ref5ff, ref6, ref7ff, ref8ff, ref9f, ref10, ref11, ref12f, ref13ff, ref14
refugees, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5ff, ref6f, ref7ff, ref8ff
Talabani, Jalal, ref1, ref2f
Talal, King of Jordan, ref1
Tantawi, Mohamed Hussein, ref1
Taylor, Hugh, ref1
terrorism
Charlie Hebdo attack (2015), ref1
East African US embassy bombings (1998), ref1
London 7/7 attacks (2005), ref1
Paris attacks (2015), ref1
September 11 attacks (2001), ref1, ref2f
World Trade Center bombing (1993), ref1
Thesiger, Wilfred, ref1, ref2
Timur, ref1f, ref2
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, ref1
Trojan War, ref1f, ref2f
Trump, Donald, ref1, ref2
Tugendhat, Tom, ref1, ref2, ref3
Tulunid dynasty (868–905), ref1
Tunisia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
al-Turabi, Hassan, ref1
Turkey, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5f, ref6ff, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15
Turkmens, ref1, ref2
Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
United Arab Emirates, ref1, ref2
United Arab Republic (1958–61), ref1
United Kingdom, ref1ff, ref2ff, ref3, ref4, ref5f, ref6, ref7, ref8ff, ref9, ref10
Brexit, ref1, ref2ff, ref3, ref4
and Egypt, ref1
and Iraq, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4ff
London 7/7 attacks (2005), ref1
and Oman, ref1
and Palestine, ref1f
and Sudan, ref1f, ref2
and Syria, ref1, ref2
United Nations, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
United States, ref1, ref2ff
and Afghanistan, ref1
East African embassy bombings (1998), ref1
and Egypt, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
and Iraq, ref1, ref2, ref3f, ref4ff, ref5, ref6f, ref7ff, ref8ff, ref9ff, ref10, ref11f, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15
and ISIS, ref1, ref2, ref3
and Kurdistan, ref1
and Kyrgyzstan, ref1
and Saudi Arabia, ref1, ref2
September 11 attacks (2001), ref1, ref2f
and Syria, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
and Tunisia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
and Uzbekistan, ref1
World Trade Center bombing (1993), ref1
Uzbekistan, ref1, ref2, ref3
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, ref1
Virgil, ref1
Wahhabism, ref1ff, ref2, ref3
Ward, William ‘Kip’, ref1
William, Duke of Cambridge, ref1
Wilson, Arnold Talbot, ref1
Wolff, Joseph, ref1
World Trade Center bombing (1993), ref1
World War I (1914–18), ref1, ref2, ref3
Yarwaessi family, ref1
al-Yawar, Abdullah, ref1
Yemen, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Yousafzai, Malala, ref1
Zainab, ref1
al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, ref1
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
Map
Prologue: What had it all been for?
1 Hold your head up, you’re an Egyptian!
Egypt, May 2011
2 Dégage!
Tunisia, June 2011
3 ‘Assad – or we burn the country’
Syria, July 2011
4 They are all thieves
Iraq, June 2011 and January 2012
5 Zero neighbours without problems
Turkey, October 2012
6 Better sixty years of tyranny than one night of anarchy
Saudi Arabia, December 2012
7 … to the hill of frankincense
Oman, December 2012
8 We have no friends but the mountains
Kurdistan, July 2013
9 ... but surely we are brave, who take the Golden Road to Samarkand
The Silk Road, June 2014
10 The Islamic State: A caliphate in accordance with the prophetic method
Jordan, March 2015
11 What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East
The Balkans, January 2016
12 And even though it all went wrong
Britain, June–July 2016
Epilogue: The sun also rises
Acknowledgements
Index
A Note About the Author
By the Same Author
Picture Section
CHAPTER 6
Better sixty years of tyranny than one night of anarchy
Saudi Arabia
December 2012
‘Here is Chop Chop Square.’ As we exited the museum in Riyadh’s Masmak fort, my Bangladeshi escort pointed towards the ochre-coloured Deera Square.
It was mid-morning. The square was almost empty. Beheadings, if any, took place at 9 a.m. I looked around, envisaging the executioner with his sword, the terrified blindfolded prisoner with his hands tied behind his back, the expectant crowds. The clamouring, the hush, the wailing. In 2012, seventy-nine executions were reported. The decapitated heads were sewn back onto the bodies before they were buried in unmarked graves. Only one country in the region carried out more executions than Saudi Arabia this year. And that was Iran, with 314.
I checked the buttons on my abaya to ensure I was fully covered. I did not want to get into any trouble with the
mutawwa, the religious police for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice.
I had purchased the abaya the previous month in New York, with the help of my old friend, Mike Juaidi, who had served as a translator to the US military in Iraq. Mike took me to a shop in Brooklyn. The shop owner proudly showed me the latest fashions in abayas, embroidered with glitz and bling. I insisted that I was only looking for a functional garment.
‘I am going to Saudi,’ I told him. ‘I just need a black cloak to throw over my clothes.’
Disappointed, he took me to the back room to view the cheap abayas. I tried one on. ‘It looks beautiful on you,’ he insisted. ‘We can take it in at the sides to show your figure more.’
I told him that wouldn’t be necessary. ‘For goodness’ sake, I’m not going to Saudi in search of a husband!’
An old Arab woman, seated in the corner of the store and dressed in full Muslim garb, laughed out loud at that.
*
I had never previously visited Saudi Arabia – nor had I desired to, frankly. My earliest image of the country had been formed from watching Death of a Princess, a 1980 docudrama about a Saudi royal who had been executed for adultery. The broadcasting of the film on ITV in the UK had been met by strong protests from the Saudis and the expulsion of the British ambassador.
Newly appointed as the current British ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was John Jenkins, who had previously served as ambassador to Iraq and Syria, envoy to Libya, and
consul-general in Jerusalem. JJ had sent me the letter of invitation that I needed in order to apply for a Saudi visa.
JJ kindly offered to host me at his residence in Riyadh. It was comfortable and spacious, but not particularly lavish. I was assigned the guest quarters. Over the years, a stream of distinguished British officials from royals to prime ministers had slept in that bed.
During my stay, I had breakfast each morning with JJ and his wife, Nancy. JJ would read The Times on his iPad and Nancy the Guardian. And I, the New York Times. We would interrupt each other constantly to share titbits of information, to comment on articles and to argue. JJ was a grammar school boy from Birmingham. He and Nancy had met at Cambridge, while JJ was working on his PhD in Classics.
After breakfast, we each went our separate ways: JJ to the embassy, Nancy to the American International School where she was the principal, and I to explore the city with JJ’s Bangladeshi driver.
As a woman, I was not permitted to drive, nor to venture out on my own. I was supposed to always be accompanied by a husband or male relative. However, for reasons that I did not want to fathom, Asian men were allowed to escort foreign women. The country was awash with Asian workers, brought in to do the jobs that Saudis regarded as beneath them.
I was expecting Riyadh to be like Dubai, and was surprised that the city did not appear more modern. The public spaces were not well cared for and the roads were not in great condition. And yet over the tall walls I could glimpse mansions
of opulence – there was considerable wealth in the private space. GDP per capita in Saudi stood at $24,000 – but that figure gave no sense of the gulf between rich and poor.
One morning, I visited Diriyah, an old neighbourhood of Riyadh, in which the houses were made out of mud. The area was being restored, but the Saudi foreman allowed me to wander through the dusty streets. I took photos with my brand-new iPad mini, which I showed to the foreman, expecting to impress him with the latest technology. The foreman took out his iPhone 5, grinning at me. All the latest Apple products were already available. Saudi Arabia, I learned, had one of the highest per-capita usages of social media in the world.
I returned to the residence in the afternoon to find JJ sitting in shorts and a T-shirt, beating away at his drum kit, muscles flexing and the veins in his shaven head pulsating. He was passionate about music, and had once played in a band.
We dined together in the evening and discussed our respective days. JJ and Nancy lived in different Saudis. He operated in the official circles of men. Nancy moved in the hidden world of women – a world she wanted to introduce me to.
One afternoon, Nancy invited me along to a Saudi ‘ladies’ tea’, and I had a glimpse of life behind closed doors. I hung my abaya alongside the other ones, which were, I noted, rather different to my own. They were luxurious, fine woollen, embroidered cloaks, which must have cost a thousand dollars apiece. Soon my eyes were bulging at the apparel of my fellow guests: cleavage-revealing tops, Prada handbags and three-inch-heeled Christian Louboutin red-soled shoes. I was wearing Diesel jeans and Birkenstocks. In order that we should all
mingle, the host proposed ‘speed-dating’. So I found myself moving from sofa to sofa, while grabbing mouthfuls of food and drinking tea.
A divorced woman revealed to me that her husband had prevented her and their children travelling outside the country. ‘He received a text from the airport when I tried to fly out of Riyadh with the children.’ I asked her why Saudi women put up with all these restrictions on their lives.
‘King Abdullah is a modernizer,’ she explained, ‘but he is pushing against traditional forces which are very resistant to change.’ Women were not so much scared of the mutawwa (the religious police), she told me, but feared being ostracized by their families. The alternative to the monarchy was religious conservatives – and that would make the position of women even worse.
The Saudi state was based on an eighteenth-century pact between Mohamed Ibn Saud and Mohamed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The latter’s followers, the Wahhabis, had strict interpretations of Sharia law, enforced by mutawwa.
‘Our society was not so strict when I was growing up,’ the divorcée told me. However, things changed after several hundred Islamist extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in 1979, taking hostage around 50,000 people.
The leader of the attack declared his brother-in-law to be the Mahdi. He proclaimed that the house of Saud had lost legitimacy because it was corrupt and a puppet of the West.
Rumours circulated that America was behind the mosque attack. Anti-American demonstrations broke out around
the world. The US embassy in Islamabad was burnt to the ground, killing two Americans and two Pakistani employees.
The US accused Ayatollah Khomeini of inspiring the attack. Earlier in 1979, he had returned to Iran from fourteen years in exile (mostly in the Iraqi city of Najaf) after the Western-backed shah, Mohamad Reza Pahlavi, fled the country in the wake of popular protests at inequality, corruption and state oppression. Fearful that the US was going to reinstall the shah, some Iranian students took American diplomats hostage at the embassy. Iran’s Islamic Revolution politicized religion to a new level, electrifying the whole region.
Saudi forces were initially reluctant to respond to the siege as it was forbidden to bear arms in the sacred Grand Mosque. The al-Sauds had to get a fatwa from the ulema, the religious establishment, to authorize a military response. The Saudi forces counterattacked, using tanks and artillery – and the help of French special forces. The two-week battle left over 250 dead.
But a deal had been made. In return for its approval of the use of force against the Islamist militants, the ulema was granted the ability to enforce stricter Islamic codes over personal behaviour. Women had to cover themselves in cloaks and were not allowed to appear in photographs or on television; longer hours of religious studies were introduced in schools; and the religious police became more rigorous.
In response to the challenges it perceived to its legitimacy at home and abroad, the Saudi monarchy began using its petrodollars from the oil boom to shore up its Wahhabi base at home and to promulgate Wahhabism overseas.
An elegant young woman told me she was convinced that change was coming to Saudi Arabia. There had been a few protests in Saudi but they were not widespread. The monarchy had increased stipends to citizens to discourage dissent. Nevertheless, she was insistent that the country could not withstand the influence of the Arab Spring.
She asked me whether I thought a country that is rich in oil could ever move towards democracy.
I was impressed by her question. It was something I had been reflecting on a lot myself. An oil-rich country did not support itself from the taxes raised from its citizens. Instead, it lived off oil ‘rents’ paid by foreigners. Hence, it was independent from society and unaccountable.
Democracy requires the possibility of the transfer of power, belief in the fairness of the system and the opportunity for different groups to win elections. As far as I could make out, the legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy came from the family’s history of conquest, its deal with the Wahhabis – and the fear of the alternative. The regime had been able to maintain itself through oil-based patronage and a strong internal intelligence system that monitored opposition. For its external defence, Saudi was dependent on the US.
However, Saudi’s oil would run out in twenty years at the existing levels of poor management and high domestic consumption. The monarchy had limited time to diversify the economy away from oil and create jobs for the country’s youth, who were increasingly connected to the rest of the world via the Internet and iPhones.
It was a fascinating afternoon. During my travels in the Middle East I had nearly always interacted with men. In Riyadh,
I was forced to wrap myself up in an abaya and forbidden from travelling around on my own. I was surprised to meet such interesting and intelligent women. While they were not at all representative of women in Saudi Arabia as a whole, I was learning there was much here that did not meet the eye. These women wanted change to come to their country. But they believed that more rights and freedoms for women would come by evolution rather than revolution.
A couple of days later, Nancy and I were invited by two of our new Saudi friends to visit one of their homes. We sat smoking shisha together in the yard. It felt terribly rebellious. Everything felt naughty in Saudi Arabia. It was like being back at school.
They told us that women were calling for more rights. They had tried to register for municipal elections. They had made headlines with their right-to-drive campaign.
One of the women was an artist. She took us inside her home to see the portraits she had painted. They hung on her own walls as she could not display them in galleries, because it was forbidden to depict heads and faces in art.
The other was a teacher. ‘One year at school, the students made models of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,’ she related. ‘The mutawwa came and chopped off all the heads.’
It took a while for this to sink in.
Seeing my dismay, the teacher went on: ‘The Wahhabis even destroyed the shrines of the Prophet’s descendants in Mecca.’ They had perceived such sites to be symbols of idolatry. It was this same reasoning that had led the Taliban to blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.
The teacher explained that the education system in Saudi Arabia was awful, despite the country’s great wealth. The king was sending tens of thousands of Saudis overseas to study. This was bound to have an impact on society one way or another when they returned.
The two women described how people were much freer in the port city of Jeddah. And in other parts of the kingdom, different peoples – Shia, Zaidis, Sufis – continued to pursue their way of life.
‘You must come on a camping trip with us in the spring,’ the teacher proposed. It was an invitation that would almost make it worth returning to Saudi. Almost.
*
One evening, I went over to one of the international compounds to visit Clarisse Pásztory, a European diplomat who had previously served in Iraq. We sat in the café compound, where a sign said it was forbidden to wear an abaya. The intent was apparently to prevent a rule enforcing such clothing – but it irked me to constantly be told what I could and could not wear.
Clarisse explained to me how the Saudi version of Salafism was ‘quietist’, as in non-political, and how Saudis tended to support the maintenance of the status quo. The monarchy was hostile to the Ikhwan, viewing it as a shadowy underground movement that aimed to upend the existing state of affairs across the Middle East, including in Saudi Arabia. ‘Better sixty years of tyranny than one night of anarchy’ is the oft-quoted Arabic adage, attributed to the medieval writer Ibn Taymiyyah.
Clarisse described how oil had brought about the close
relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. In 1933, the Saudi monarchy had granted a concession to the US company Standard Oil – later to be called Aramco – to drill. But it was not until 1938 that it struck oil and Saudi Arabia was discovered to have massive reserves. President Roosevelt declared that the defence of the kingdom was of vital interest to the US.
In February 1945, on his way back from Yalta, where he had discussed with Churchill and Stalin the future of post-war Europe, President Roosevelt met up with Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the first monarch and founder of Saudi Arabia, on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. It was the first time Ibn Saud had left his country. Roosevelt did not have long to live, but he wanted to cement a personal relationship with the Saudi ruler, recognizing the strategic importance of the country. In return for a steady flow of oil, the US guaranteed Saudi Arabia’s security.
That guarantee was put to the test when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened Saudi Arabia. The United States led a coalition to evict him and to ensure that he would not gain control of the region’s energy reserves. The number of US troops in the Gulf increased from hundreds to tens of thousands.
But since 9/11, relations between the two countries had become more complicated. Back in the 1980s, the US had regarded Saudi Arabia’s increased religious outreach as a check against communist expansion – and both countries had supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan to counter the Soviet invaders. But Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen and a
so-called Afghan Arab veteran of that war, had turned against the United States, attacking the symbols of US power in 2001: the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Fifteen out of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens. This raised concerns about the form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia.
The two countries no longer saw eye to eye on current events in the region. Much to Saudi Arabia’s dismay, the Obama administration seemed to applaud the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt. If the US was prepared to so quickly abandon a long-term partner such as Mubarak, how reliable was it as an ally? The Saudis wanted Assad removed, but the US remained hesitant about intervening in Syria.
With technological advances, including fracking, increasing US shale production, the United States was weaning itself off its dependence on Saudi oil. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia was strengthening its trade links with China by meeting Beijing’s soaring demand for oil while importing cheap Chinese goods.
Not only were its relations with the United States under strain, but Saudi Arabia also felt itself challenged within the region. The custodian of the two holiest mosques in Islam – the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina – was competing not only for leadership of the Muslim world but also for the role Islam should play in political life. The young people who came out across the region to protest in the Arab Spring were in essence questioning the political legitimacy of ruling elites.
‘The Saudis view the Arab Spring as a conspiracy – backed by the West – to bring the Ikhwan to power,’ Clarisse explained.
In the recent parliamentary elections in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nour Party (a Salafi group) had won 70 per cent of the vote between them; and the presidential election had been won by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamad Morsi – even though the Ikhwan had initially pledged they would not put forward a candidate. In the elections in Tunisia for a new constituent assembly, the Islamist party Ennahda won a plurality. Saudi viewed democratic Islamist parties as a threat to its leadership of the Sunni Muslim world.
In addition, Qatar was playing an outsize role on the global stage, using its wealth to gain influence far beyond that which might be expected from a country of 300,000 people with limited military strength. It shared the North Dome gas field with Iran and was the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. Qatar had become a major backer of the Ikhwan across the region – as well as of Islamist fighters. The Doha-based Al Jazeera broadcaster extensively covered the protests against regimes, shaping perceptions across the region and beyond with its footage from the front lines – an effective instrument for promoting Qatar’s partisan position.
Turkey also saw opportunities to increase its role in the region, with Erdoğan holding up his country’s political system as an example for others to emulate. Libya had become the major battleground for models of governance in the Sunni world, with Middle Eastern countries providing support to different factions. All this was pushing apart former allies – and bringing closer former competitors such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Despite all the limitations on day-to-day life, Clarisse seemed to be enjoying her posting in Saudi, watching geopolitical shifts
up close. There was no domestic politics as such to analyse, but there was court gossip. Lots of it. Ibn Saud had fathered forty-five sons, and all the kings of Saudi have come from this pool. But which of the grandsons would lead the country once all of the sons had died? There was much speculation over the succession.
*
During my visit, JJ hosted a dinner at the ambassador’s residence, inviting a number of diplomats from different countries. Classical music played in the background as the guests mingled before taking their seats.
Next to me was an Arab diplomat who gave me further insights into Saudi Arabia. He observed that Saudi Arabia, has a different outlook from other Arab countries, because it was never colonized.
‘Saudi Arabia is obsessed with Iran’s projection of power – and this defines how it views the Middle East,’ he noted. He went on to outline how the Iraq War had kindled a new Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And Saudi Arabia did not feel it was doing well in this contest. It had accused the US, he said, of ‘handing Iraq to Iran on a silver platter’.
Iraq, which had previously been the major buffer to Iran, had turned into a battlefield. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah was hostile towards Iraq’s prime minister, because Maliki had not fulfilled a promise he had made to work towards reconciliation with Sunnis – and because he regarded Maliki as a puppet of Iran. Yet the king had great respect for the ‘quietist’ Shia cleric, Ayatollah Sistani, an Iranian based in
Najaf. Previously, the Saudi monarchy had supported certain Shia parties against Saddam.
‘The king,’ the Arab diplomat said, ‘is fearful of Iran and its ambitions.’ Iran even portrayed the toppling of the regimes in Cairo and Tunis as a continuation of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. ‘The king believes Iran is trying to destabilize the Saudi regime through its Shia population.’
Saudi Arabia’s Shia, who constitute around 10 per cent of the country’s population, were concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province. When some of them joined in the Arab Spring protests in 2011, calling for equal rights, the king suspected an Iranian hand.
Saudi Arabia had intervened militarily in Bahrain in March 2011, invited by the monarchy to help restore order following weeks of demonstrations. Saudi Arabia suspected that Iran was supporting Shia protests in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, in an attempt to overthrow the Sunni monarchy. The US called for restraint – its navy’s Fifth Fleet was based in Bahrain and the US had close ties to Bahrain’s royal family.
‘Syria has now turned into the key battleground between Saudi and Iran,’ the Arab diplomat explained. The late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad had maintained cordial relations with King Abdullah, and before he died in 2000 he had even asked the Saudi monarch to look out for his son, Bashar. However, the king had turned against Bashar al-Assad for Syria’s alleged involvement in the 2005 assassination of a key Saudi ally, Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafic Hariri; and for maintaining close ties to Iran. The political alliance between the Islamic revolutionary regime in Tehran and the secular
Baathist regime in Damascus had initially been forged over mutual hostility towards Saddam and Israel – and resistance against the West. Now the Iranian-Syrian alliance was against Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia and Iran sought to prevent the expansion of each other’s influence not through direct military conflict but through proxies.
Assad’s violent response to the protests in Syria was driving his country into civil war, leading different groups to seek external support in their domestic conflict. Iran deployed some of its own military advisers to bolster the Assad regime, as well as Shia militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Foremost among these was Hezbollah, the Party of God, which Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had helped Lebanon’s downtrodden Shia establish in the early 1980s to resist Israel.
Saudi Arabia had initially provided funding and weapons to the more secular Free Syrian Army before turning to Salafi groups it deemed ‘acceptable’ – while steering clear of the more extreme ones. But Sunni fighters were frequently switching groups, gravitating to whichever one seemed the most successful at any given time and competing against each other.
‘Saudi strategy in Syria is not going at all well,’ the Arab diplomat acknowledged.
*
‘No trip to Riyadh is complete without a visit to the mall,’ Nancy announced as she instructed the Bangladeshi driver to take us to Panorama Mall. It was quite a bizarre experience. As we wandered through, I noted that all the stores were
Western – Marks and Spencer, Zara, Karen Millen. But the McDonald’s and Baskin Robbins food counters and seating areas were segregated by gender; the mannequins had all been decapitated in deference to Wahhabi sensibilities; and there were no changing rooms in the stores for women.
Nancy, who was quite the fashion queen – with her short peroxided blonde hair, bright red lipstick and gold-embroidered abaya – took me to Desigual and helped me choose a tight-fitting low-cut dress, covered in a bright print of women’s heads.
Over dinner on my last evening in Riyadh, I spoke to JJ about the contradictions I had seen. ‘Modernity for many Saudis,’ he suggested, ‘is a commodity that you can buy. It is Baskin Robbins, it is the iPhone. Modernity for us Europeans, at least, is Descartes, Hobbes, Hume… the French Revolution. We are cognitively modern but we ache for a past of certainty. They take an unchanging divine revelation as their foundational text but ache for a future of change.’
I went to bed wondering whether he was right. Weren’t the Internet and smartphones disrupting everything?
I had gained a more nuanced view of Saudi Arabia during my visit, but there was so much I would never understand even if I spent years here – which I had no intention of doing. Everything was hidden behind walls and abayas. So much did not make sense. Why, for God’s sake, would anyone cut off the heads of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?
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CHAPTER 3
‘Assad – or we burn the country’
Syria
July 2011
The first image to greet me on arrival at Damascus Airport was a poster of President Bashar al-Assad with an Arabic slogan proclaiming: ‘Leader of the youth, hope of the youth.’
I was lucky to have got here. The travel advice issued by both the US and UK governments was to stay away from Syria. And the Syrian regime, wary of interfering foreigners, was denying most requests to visit. When I’d submitted my application for a visa to the Syrian embassy in London’s Belgrave Square, I had been taken to a small back office for an interview with an official who was polite but not warm. He asked me why I wanted to visit Syria at this time. I responded that I was fascinated by archaeology and was between jobs. I had been to Syria twelve years before, loved it, and wanted to make a return trip. He quizzed me on current events in Syria to test whether I was a Western journalist intent on writing negative stories about the regime. I feigned little interest, and brought the conversation
back to Syria’s famous archaeological sites. Satisfied by my responses, the official issued me a visa.
I jumped in a taxi outside the airport, and as we drove I asked the driver about the situation in Syria. ‘Things are fine,’ he assured me. ‘There has been some trouble around the country, but things are OK in Damascus.’ With one hand on the wheel, he waved the other hand in various directions as he pointed out where different communities lived. Druze to the left, Palestinian refugees to the right, Iraqi refugees over to the side. Alawite (a Shia offshoot) villages over there, Christian villages over here; Kurds lived in the north. Sunnis were around 65 per cent of the population, he told me.
I asked him how he knew who somebody was or whether they were Sunni or Shia. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘and I’m not even interested in knowing. There is no sectarianism here in Syria.’ I could not tell whether he genuinely believed this or if he was just trying to give a foreign visitor a positive impression of his country. While recognition of religious or ethnic difference might once merely have been a social distinction, it had certainly become more politicized in recent years.
We passed Damascus University. Outside, there were lots of flags and pictures of Bashar and his deceased father, Hafez, the former president. As we drove through al-Umawiyeen Square, I saw young men and women gathering, holding Syrian flags. ‘It is not a demonstration,’ the driver told me, ‘it is a celebration – a celebration of the government.’ Later, I watched the event on television; it had made the international news. Pop singers and fireworks had entertained the tens of thousands of Syrians who had come out to the square to show
their support for the president. This surprised me. Most of the media coverage I had seen before my arrival shone the spotlight on opposition supporters – typically young and secular – who were demanding jobs and transparent government.
*
The next day, I walked through the 600-metre-long covered market of Souq al-Hamidiyya inside the old walled city of Damascus. It was buzzing with life. Store owners sat outside their shops, trying to entice potential customers to buy clothes, textiles, rugs, antiques, copper, spices, perfumes and sweets. Judging by the customers at the counter, Bakdash, Syria’s oldest ice cream parlour, was doing fine trade.
I emerged from the market in front of the Umayyad Mosque. I entered the ticket office and paid the entrance fee for foreigners. A female attendant passed me a hooded grey abaya to cover myself. The cloak stank, and I wondered when it had last been washed and how many women had worn it in the sweltering summer heat. I put it on over my clothes nevertheless, pulling up the pointed hood to ensure my hair was covered. Then I removed my shoes and entered the mosque.
It was built on what was once the site of a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the temple was transformed into a Byzantine cathedral, later dedicated to John the Baptist. After Damascus became the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, the church was demolished and replaced in 715 with the Umayyad Mosque, one of the oldest and most magnificent in the Muslim world.
In the prayer hall, Muslims are segregated by gender but not by sect. It is a splendid structure, with three aisles and columns holding up the roof. Some of the original eighth-century mosaics are still visible. In the middle is a domed shrine, believed to contain the head of John the Baptist – known as the prophet Yahya to Muslims. Mandaeans, followers of an ancient gnostic religion with dualist worldviews, press their heads up against the metal grille of the shrine during their annual pilgrimage. Even Pope John Paul II had visited.
Crossing into the courtyard, I noticed a group on their knees. One man was weeping as he repeated the invocation ‘Ya Hussein’. The others followed suit, tears flowing, looking quite distraught.
A man in a turban was addressing a group of Iranian pilgrims in Farsi. While there were few Western visitors, Shia religious tourism appeared to be thriving.
I passed three women sitting cross-legged on the ground in their black abayas. One made a rather facetious comment about my cloak. She was stunned when I spoke back to her in Arabic.
‘Where are you from?’ she asked me.
‘London, Britain,’ I responded. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Babil, Iraq,’ she replied, telling me her group was visiting the shrines in Syria. She pointed to the shrine of Hussein, which is believed to house the head of the grandson of the Prophet Mohamad who was killed by the Umayyads at Karbala in Iraq in 680. The women and children of the Prophet’s family had apparently walked here following the Battle of Karbala, and were imprisoned in the mosque for sixty days.
I exited the mosque, relieved to return the borrowed abaya. Before long, I was striding down Straight Street, passing Roman colonnades, shops selling antiques and a Christian liquor store with a picture of Assad prominently displayed. It was on the ‘street which is called Straight’ that the disciple Ananias met Paul, restored his sight and baptized him – or so the biblical story of Paul’s conversion to Christianity is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.
And it was at a café off this street, as a tourist twelve years before this trip, that I had by chance struck up conversation with a Syrian named Ammar. We had hung out together for a couple of days. He showed me around Damascus and took me out to the Christian village of Maaloula, where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken. Ammar was a writer. He told me he was one of the 0.1 per cent who had not voted for Hafez al-Assad in the presidential elections. He had never met any others. No one back then had dared speak out against the regime.
How times had changed. Tens of thousands of Syrians around the country were openly calling for reforms and jobs. I wondered where Ammar was now.
Turning onto a narrow, cobbled street, I passed two seated men drinking tea. One turned to the other: ‘Who says there are no tourists in Syria? There’s one!’ I turned around and replied, ‘I am the last tourist in Syria!’
They invited me to join them, fetching me a chair and some tea. One was a hotel owner. He had recently converted an old Arab house into a boutique hotel. The previous year, he had rented rooms for $400 a night. Now he had reduced
the rate to $100. But like all other hotels in town, his was down to zero occupancy.
The other man was a tourist guide. He was deeply frustrated. ‘We need change,’ he told me. It became clear that these two friends, one of whom was Christian and the other a Sunni, held different opinions.
The hotel owner stated, ‘Bashar is a very good man. He is educated. He is decent. The problem is with the circle of advisers around him.’ He pointed to his friend, the tourist guide, describing him as one of the people who wanted change. ‘What do they want? Freedom? What do they mean by freedom? Who is better than Bashar? If he is removed, the country could descend into chaos like Iraq. Look, there are hardly any Christians living in Iraq now.’
The tourist guide, however, insisted that two-thirds of the people in Syria wanted change. And he would continue to support the growing movement of opposition to the regime.
Two thousand Syrians had died since the unrest ignited four months earlier in March 2011, after some schoolchildren in Dera’a – a city seventy miles south of Damascus – wrote on a wall the revolutionary chant heard on the streets of Tunis and Cairo: ‘Ash-sha’b yurid isqat an-nizam [The people want the fall of the regime]’. When the children were detained by the local security chief, their families and supporters marched to the governor’s house to demand that they be set free. Some were killed when security forces opened fire. Funerals turned into rallies, and more people were killed. When the children were released two weeks later, having
been beaten and with rumours that their fingernails had been pulled out, protests spread around the country. The Syrian revolution had begun.
*
My phone rang. ‘Salaam aleikum... Shlonij?’ the man asked.
‘Ilhamdillah,’ I responded, knowing he was an Iraqi by the dialect but not recognizing the voice.
He went on: ‘Miss Emma, I am so pleased that you contact me when you are in trouble. Of course I will send you money.’
It took me a moment to realize I was speaking with Sheikh Abdullah from Mosul. I had no idea what he was going on about, but it was nice to hear from him. We chatted for a while and I caught up on his news. An hour later, a Palestinian friend called to check that I was OK. Why, I wondered, did people think I was not OK? This was odd.
It was hard to find Internet access, but in the evening when I managed to open my email, I discovered that my Yahoo account had been hacked. I could see that a scammer had logged on from Nigeria and had written to everyone in my address book telling them that I was in Spain, had been robbed and needed money sent to a specific bank account. I immediately changed my password, then emailed a friend in Liverpool and asked her to inform the police of the scammer’s bank details so they could track him down. She phoned the Merseyside Police and reported back that they said I should contact the police in Syria. I shook my head in disbelief. The police in Syria?! Was no one watching the news? Did people not know what was happening?
While my friend was trying to get the police to notify the bank of the dodgy account, her husband, not recognizing the ruse, transferred $1,000 to it. Who else, I wondered, out of the kind, generous people that I knew around the world, was sending funds to this person thinking I was in trouble? I set about responding to the dozens of concerned emails I had received.
*
I did not immediately recognize Colonel Raad. We hadn’t seen each other in two years, and he had put on weight and was not dressed in his habitual military uniform. We greeted each other warmly. He could not believe that I’d tracked him down in Damascus and seemed really touched. We’d first met back in 2007 in Baghdad, when he brought together a group of Sunni men in Ghazaliya to fight against al-Qaeda. He’d stood out, as he was so professional.
Colonel Raad had been a special forces officer in the old Iraqi army. Working closely with the US military during the 2007 troop surge, he had brought peace to his neighbourhood. But even so, in 2009 he was arrested in Baghdad on what appeared to be trumped-up charges, by those seeking to undermine the Sahwa (the Sunni Awakening). He was released after ten days, but the incident made him nervous. Fearful that at any stage false allegations could be brought against him, he had sought refuge in Syria.
We sat in a café in the Old City chatting about the past. He reminded me of the time I had called him a hero for saving so many lives — Iraqi and American. Then he spoke about how
he once went to Bahrain with the US military and met with General Petraeus and Admiral Fallon; and how Ambassador Khalilzad had once asked his advice on how to set up a Sahwa in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. Officers in the new Iraqi army, established after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, had said to him: ‘Just wait. The Americans will treat you like they did the Red Indians. They will discard you like a used match.’
‘How did you expect it would end?’ I asked him. He told me that he had hoped the relationship would be a long one and that the Sahwa and Americans would work together to combat Iranian influence.
‘But I was wrong,’ he said sadly. ‘And those officers in the new Iraqi army were right.’
We took a taxi together to Sayyidah Zainab, in south-east Damascus. The mosque contained the grave of Zainab, daughter of Ali and Fatimah — and granddaughter of the Prophet. It had become a centre of Shia pilgrimage, and this was the neighbourhood to which many Iraqi refugees had gravitated. Markets had sprung up around the mosque. Restaurants were barbequing masgouf, with fish from the Euphrates that they brought live in buckets. There was a large, bustling bus station, with offices selling tickets to Karbala, Najaf and Baghdad, as well as other Iraqi destinations.
The Syrian government had claimed that there were 1.2 million Iraqis living in Syria. International organizations, however, believed that the numbers had decreased to around 300,000 (60 per cent Sunni, 20 per cent Shia and 20 per cent Christian). With the increasing unrest in Syria, some Iraqis
had decided to try their luck back home. I’d heard that one community had sent back six families to see how they got on. But when one person was murdered, it had deterred others from returning.
According to Colonel Raad, Syrians had been very good to Iraqis of all different ethnicities and sects, and the Iraqis lived peacefully together, grateful to Assad for giving them sanctuary. However, the troubles in Syria were starting to negatively impact relations among Iraqis. There were also some reports of Iraqis being beaten up by Palestinians taking revenge for being expelled from Kuwait in 1991, when Yasser Arafat expressed support for Saddam’s invasion of that country.
Colonel Raad told me he had applied for a visa to the United States. A US battalion commander, with whom he had worked closely, had written a glowing letter of recommendation. But it had been over a year, and Raad was still waiting for a response. I advised him not to put his life on hold waiting for the visa.
But, he told me, he could not work legally in Syria, and he was afraid to return to Iraq. Where could he go? Many of the Awakening leaders had been thrown in jail, killed or, like him, had fled the country.
Raad believed that if it were up to the US military, he would get a visa to the United States. But he knew the decision was in the hands of others. I assured him that the bonds he had with those American soldiers were genuine. US soldiers who served in Iraq frequently asked after the Awakening leaders they had worked with, deeply troubled at their abandonment.
‘I know,’ he responded. He was still in email contact with them. ‘We are brothers.’
*
Robert Ford, the US ambassador to Syria, invited me for dinner one evening at his residence in Damascus. We sat out in the garden, under an awning, catching up on each other’s lives. We had become good friends in Iraq, where he had served three tours. Like me, he had been against the war, but he had volunteered to go help rebuild the country. His first exposure to the Arab world had been as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. Since then, he had spent his whole State Department career working on the Middle East and was fluent in Arabic.
Robert was being openly harassed by the Syrian regime. Things had escalated after he visited Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city, on 7 July 2011, just before my visit. He had not received instructions from Washington to go to Hama. Nor had he sought permission. Instead, he had shot off an email to the State Department informing them of the trip before he headed out. He wanted to witness the stand-off between the Syrian army and local residents, hoping that the spotlight from the international community would ensure violence did not break out. Video footage showed local residents greeting Robert’s arrival and draping his SUV with roses and olive branches.
But the Syrian government was furious. They viewed it as evidence of US interference in internal affairs, and accused the United States of seeking to destabilize the country. A few days after his visit to Hama, protesters breached his residence
in Damascus, as well as the embassy compound. They hurled rocks, eggs and tomatoes, and replaced the American flags with Syrian ones. Robert showed me around his home, pointing out the damage that had been done.
Hama, with its giant water wheels, would be forever associated with the brutal crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood insurrection by Rifaat al-Assad, brother of Hafez al-Assad, in 1982. Over 20,000 residents had been killed in a matter of three weeks. The Assads would have expected there to one day be a reckoning – and had no doubt prepared themselves for that eventuality.
Syria had experienced countless coups from the time of its independence from France in 1946 until Hafez al-Assad became the president in 1971. An Alawite from a humble background, Hafez had become a pilot in the air force and risen up through the ranks of the Baath Party, an Arab socialist movement in Syria and Iraq. As president, he amended the constitution to recognize the Baath Party as the ‘leader of the state and society’. The party reserved senior public-sector positions for its members, it indoctrinated children at schools and it monitored the security forces. Over time, real power became concentrated in the hands of Assad, his family and his close advisers. He groomed Bassel, his eldest son, as his successor. But when Bassel was killed in a car crash near the airport, Bashar, the younger son, became heir to the family business of ruling Syria.
When Hafez died in 2000, there were hopes that Bashar would be a reformer who would lead Syria out of isolation. Bashar, after all, was a London-trained ophthalmologist and a computer geek. And he was married to Asma, a Syrian Sunni
born and bred in Britain, educated at King’s College London, who had worked as an investment banker for J.P. Morgan.
However, after eleven years of Bashar’s rule, hopes for reform had long faded.
Robert was deeply disgusted by what was going on – and was not going to remain silent when presented with evidence of people being randomly tortured and killed by their government. Slight, short and bespectacled, Robert hardly presented a menacing figure, but I observed a new steely confidence about him. He refused to be cowed, and was standing up for what he believed in. He described how the Assad regime was as bad as – if not worse than – Saddam’s. Security services tortured dissenters, intimidated the population and cultivated a network of informants. There was no trust. And there was no willingness on the part of the regime to compromise.
Looks could be misleading, Robert told me. He had met Bashar in person. He had been struck by how out of touch the president was with ordinary Syrians, by his lack of concern about human rights abuses and by his ruthlessness. The man was a mafia boss, through and through. And people like that didn’t change.
Two months before I arrived in Syria, Obama had given a speech in which he said, ‘The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy. President Assad now has a choice: he can lead that transition, or get out of the way.’ I told Robert I had heard a number of Syrians express their belief that the United States was going to intervene – just as it was doing in Libya. This belief was giving them hope, and leading more people to mobilize in opposition to the regime.
‘Isn’t there anything the international community can do to prevent the situation in Syria escalating to a full-scale civil war?’ I asked Robert. ‘Can’t someone bring the different parties together to mediate some solution before it’s too late?’ He told me he had been trying. But his efforts didn’t seem to be getting traction.
Robert explained that Assad had assumed he would not be affected by the Arab Spring because he was young, relatively new in power, and Syria was part of the axis of resistance to the US. But Assad had badly misjudged the situation. Young people were not protesting against America – they were calling for jobs and an end to corruption. Assad could have sacked the official responsible for locking up and mistreating the children in Dera’a, which might have deflected the protests or quickly taken the wind out of them. He could have shown a measure of understanding for the demands of the young, secular Syrians for transparency, better government and jobs – and implemented some reforms. But, instead, Assad had chosen to go on the attack, accusing the young protestors of being terrorists and sending gangs of Alawite thugs to beat them up. He had also released jihadists from jail, knowing that their presence among the opposition would undermine the image of the secular activists.
Towards the end of the evening, Robert told me that he expected to be withdrawn from Syria in the not-too-distant future. It would only be a matter of time. Until then, he was determined to serve as a witness to the behaviour of the regime, in the hope that his presence might deter worse human rights abuses.
*
A few days later, I jumped into a taxi to go to the Harasta station, three miles north-east of the city centre, to take a bus to Palmyra. The taxi driver was a smiling Damascene in his twenties, whose ancestral origins, he told me, were Turkish. He had graduated from university with a degree in economics and trade, but there was no work so he was having to earn a living as a taxi driver. ‘It is not right,’ he said. ‘There have to be reforms.’ He saw the difficult economic situation in Syria as part of a global trend. He pointed out that protests about the economy and unemployment were taking place in Spain, Portugal and Greece, too. Young people everywhere were increasingly frustrated at the lack of opportunities.
We talked about events in the region. ‘Gaddafi is mentally ill,’ he said. ‘He thinks he is the king of kings. Zenga zenga.’ He laughed as he imitated the Libyan leader.
The driver noted that Ben Ali and Mubarak had only lasted days before they gave up power. ‘As for Syria, the regime will not give up power peacefully. No chance. It’s Assad – or we burn the country,’ he said, quoting the slogan used by Assad’s supporters.
When we arrived at the station, we discovered that buses to Palmyra now departed from the Pullman station due to ‘current events’, so the taxi driver took me there. He pointed to the cost of the journey on the meter. I insisted on paying him double as he had been so kind and helpful. He refused. I insisted. ‘God be with you,’ he said, as he waved me farewell.
To get into the bus station, I was surprised to find I had to put my bag through an X-ray machine and walk through a scanner. However, there was no indication that the machines
were working, as no one seemed to be paying much attention and no beeps or lights went off. Once through the entrance, I discovered a multitude of offices selling tickets to the same destinations. I was immediately approached by touts trying to get me to buy from their office and offering me special VIP treatment. I shrugged them off. I had not a clue which company to choose.
I approached a man and asked him how I should decide which bus to take to Palmyra. He took me through to the back, to where the buses were lined up. Some were large, modern, air-conditioned ones. Others were much less luxurious. He pointed to a bus run by the Ayman company, and recommended I took one of theirs. It was 250 Syrian pounds ($5) for the 150-mile trip. He then directed me to the police station ‘next to the picture of the president’. Inside, an officer asked to see my passport. Then he stamped my ticket. In front of a few other Syrians he said to me: ‘Next time you must give me a cell phone as a present.’
‘I am the only tourist at the moment in Syria,’ I replied, ‘and next time you should give me a present.’ Everyone laughed, including the officer.
I spent the next forty-five minutes sitting on a bench watching people go by. Young guys in jeans looking quite Western. Older men in dishdasha and keffiyeh. Young women wearing tight-fitting jeans, shirts and colourful headscarves. Others wearing more traditional abayas or long fashionable trench coats (in the summer’s heat) which covered most of their contours. A woman smiled at me as she passed. A man offered to sell me a lottery ticket before he realized I was a foreigner, then he grinned. No one stared. Everyone was friendly.
On the bus, the conductor gave each of us a plastic cup for water, a black plastic bag for our rubbish and a sweet. Then he taped newspaper across the top of the windscreen to protect the driver from the glare of the sun. First, we listened to a recital of passages from the Quran, and then an Egyptian movie was put on the TV.
Before we left the station, a policeman came onto the bus to check everyone’s identity papers. On the outskirts of Damascus, a makeshift military checkpoint was stopping vehicles coming into town. There were long lines of cars waiting to get through.
As we drove, I stared out the window at the neglected villages. In recent years, drought had driven more and more Syrians from the countryside to the cities, where they had not really integrated and where there were not enough jobs.
A couple of hours later, we were stopped on the outskirts of Palmyra. A man came on board to check identity cards. He barely looked at my passport, but he examined the IDs of the Syrian passengers closely. He wore a deep blue jumpsuit, with green webbing stuffed with ammunition. I looked out the window. Two men in jeans, with rifles slung over their shoulders, were stopping cars and asking to see papers. Through the front window of the bus, I saw a third man sitting under a canopy beside a pickup truck with a weapon on the back. Initially, I thought they were militia. It was only when the man in the blue jumpsuit walked past me to get off the bus that I noticed the white initials ‘CTU’ on his back. I assumed that stood for ‘counter-terrorism unit’. I turned to the passenger next to me and whispered, ‘Are they with the regime?’ He nodded nervously.
After the bus dropped me off in Palmyra, I made my way to my hotel, checked into my room and took an afternoon siesta.
Later, I headed out to visit the ancient ruins. I went first to the Temple of Baal, where the caretaker seemed surprised to see me and offered me a cup of tea. He told me that prior to the beginning of the unrest they had received lots of tourists each day. Now there were none.
I paid the 500 Syrian pound ($10) entrance fee, and set out to see the sights. I walked among the ruins for three hours. No one else was there – just me. I marvelled at the size of the pillars. Some had been brought centuries ago from Aswan in southern Egypt. How on earth had they transported them? I was taken back through the centuries to the time of the Emperor Hadrian, to Queen Zenobia’s rebellion against the Roman Empire. I imagined people walking along the colonnade, chatting as they went about their daily affairs. I pictured the discussions held in the theatre, the feasts in the banqueting hall. I continued up to Diocletian’s camp, where the Roman emperor’s army was once based. I sat on a rock watching the sun set, lost in my thoughts.
The temperature dropped quickly and I strolled back to my hotel. I ate dinner on my own, but later in the evening I sat outside on the hotel balcony and chatted with a Syrian businessman, the only other guest, over a bottle of Lebanese wine while the wind howled around us.
We discussed relations between the West and the Muslim world. ‘When people in the West think of Muslims they think of bin Laden,’ the Syrian lamented, shaking his head sadly. ‘But this is wrong. Muslims are peaceful people. Bin Laden
and George W. Bush are two sides of the same coin. We should not judge Muslims and Christians by them.’
We considered what might happen next in Syria. Would Assad be able to reach a compromise with the protesters, agreeing to significant reforms and free elections, without the Alawites deposing him? Or would the regime try to violently crush the protests and risk the country being plunged into a bloody civil war?
There was one thing of which the businessman was absolutely sure: Assad would not give up easily. He had seen what had happened to Mubarak and Ben Ali. He was going to follow Gaddafi’s example and fight back. Western leaders had called for Assad to step down, but were totally misjudging his determination to stay in power.
The businessman had met Assad a number of times and thought he was a decent man. He opined that the problem was that those around him prevented change. He noted that, in Syria’s history, it had always been the business class that determined who ruled. If they withdrew their support from the regime, then it would fall. So far, the business people – Alawite, Christian and Sunni – were staying with Assad.
The businessman told me that although every Syrian claimed there was no sectarianism, tensions in the country were rising. There were real problems between Sunnis and Alawites. Many Syrians were waiting to see what direction things appeared to be heading in before they committed to the government or the opposition. He said that the Al Jazeera Arabic network consistently ran stories about people being killed by the Syrian regime. This had incited the youth in Palmyra to take to the streets and protest.
When I climbed into bed, I switched on the television and surfed back and forth between channels. Footage from Homs and Hama showed tens of thousands had taken to the streets, chanting ‘Irhal, Irhal ya Bashar [Go, go Bashar]’. The government television channel told people not to believe the propaganda that members of the military were deserting. Everything was under control, it claimed. It blamed Islamist terrorists, criminals and gangs for the unrest – and accused Al Jazeera of spreading lies and sedition and pushing foreign agendas.
*
My return journey to Damascus was without incident.
At the bus station, I jumped into a taxi. I tried to strike up a conversation with the driver, who told me he was a Palestinian and that he supported the regime. He asked me where I was from. When I told him I was British, he responded coldly: ‘You gave away my country.’ The conversation was not off to a good start.
‘Sorry,’ I responded.
‘I don’t mean you personally. I mean you, the British.’
As a Brit, I had been accused many times of causing all the problems in the Middle East. Every child in the region knew about the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British foreign secretary called for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. In fact, Britain had made contradictory promises over who would be in charge of the former Ottoman domains. In a series of correspondence written in 1915 and 1916 between the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir
Henry McMahon, and the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, it was agreed that Arab forces would revolt against Ottoman rule in return for a future independent Arab kingdom that would include the Arab Peninsula, Syria, Iraq and Palestine. But, at the same time, Sir Mark Sykes of the British Foreign Office and François Georges-Picot of the French foreign ministry negotiated a secret 1916 agreement to demarcate separate spheres of influence for Britain and France by a line drawn in the sand ‘from the “e” in Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk’, as Sykes put it, with the Holy Land coming under an international administration.
In the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, Britain was especially interested in the fate of the Middle East for a number of reasons: controlling the region’s oil fields (Churchill took the historic decision, on the eve of World War I, to shift fuel for the Royal Navy from coal to oil); supporting Jewish aspirations in Palestine in order to protect the eastern flank of the Suez Canal and to encourage American Jews to pressure the US into entering the war in support of the Allies; and safeguarding sea and land routes to India. Part of the reason that people in the region were so willing to believe conspiracy theories was because they learned from a young age of the scheming of the great powers.
In the end, Arabs had gained independence – but divided into a number of nation states rather than the dream of Arab nationalists for a single territory bound by language, history and culture. And the establishment of Israel in Palestine was viewed by many as a colonial imposition to keep Arabs divided.
The taxi driver was clearly in a bad mood – and had taken an immediate dislike to me. I sank into silence. I did not know what else to say. It was a complicated history.
When the taxi pulled up at a crossroads, I suddenly noticed a hundred or so men, to our right, dressed scruffily in dark grey clothes and carrying large batons. They looked menacing, and my pulse started to race. I had not built up any rapport with the driver and did not trust him at all. I doubted he would protect me if the gang noticed me and tried to drag me out of the car.
A policeman in the vehicle in front got out and shouted directions to the gang.
‘Who are these people?’ I asked the taxi driver.
‘They are with the government,’ he said approvingly. ‘They are going over to the mosque to make sure there are no demonstrations after Friday prayers.’
So these were the feared shabiha. I had read about ghostly groups of thugs – believed to be gangs of young Alawite men – beating up demonstrators and intimidating people. They acted with impunity, sometimes alongside the Syrian army, sometimes independently. Videos had been posted on line of shabiha beating and stabbing protestors, and burning the cars and homes of activists. The regime denied any knowledge of the shabiha – while outsourcing to them much of the crackdown on opposition.
My driver was clearly pro-Assad and was not in the slightest bit perturbed. I sank lower in my seat. Fortunately, the traffic started to move again and we drove past without my attracting any attention.
*
A few days later, on my last weekend in Syria, I met up with Robert Ford again. He had invited me to join him and a few of his embassy colleagues on a visit to some of his favourite haunts in Damascus.
Our first stop was a furniture workshop. I watched entranced as two young men shaped small pieces of mother of pearl using a filing machine. Any lapse of concentration would have sent their fingers flying through the air. Then they inserted the different fragments they had so carefully sculpted into a block of wood. Stacked against the walls behind them were beautiful boxes, tables and chests of drawers displaying the mosaic of wood, mother of pearl and stone for which Damascus is famed.
Then we went to an art gallery, where Robert was warmly greeted by the Syrian Christian owner. He walked us around the displays hung on the walls of the beautiful Damascene house. I stopped in front of a couple of paintings by a well-known Syrian artist. He had painted heads – heads without mouths and ears.
After the tour, we sat in the courtyard drinking tea. Before long the conversation turned to the situation facing the country.
By now everyone in Syria had heard about Robert’s trip to Hama – and had an opinion on it. I had heard differing views from various Syrians. Some claimed that the Americans were deliberately stoking up sectarian tensions and causing the problems in Hama; others believed that the visit had prevented more people being killed, by showing that the international community was watching. One had told me that the Americans were supporting the regime – why else would the regime have allowed the visit to go ahead?
‘Next time you feel like visiting Hama, Mr Ambassador,’ the gallery owner said with a smile, ‘don’t! Come have tea with me in my gallery instead.’
*
In the courtyard of Beit Jabri restaurant, in the Old City, I ate my last plate of fuul. The beautiful boutique hotels, established in restored Arab houses, lay empty. The rug stores and galleries had no customers. There were no visitors to the castles and archaeological sites.
I felt sick to my stomach. Ben Ali and Mubarak had both given up power when the security forces were unwilling to use violence to crush the popular protests. But in Syria, things were different. Assad was deliberately stoking sectarianism. He had ensured that key components of the security forces – in particular Alawites – believed their own fate was tied to his survival. They were therefore prepared to fight for him.
Before my eyes, I could see the shattering of the beautiful mosaic of Syria’s different communities. Descending on this land was a horror that few seemed willing to recognize, let alone try to forestall. I had witnessed civil war before. In Iraq.
By the same author
The Unravelling
Picture section
[image: p1]
Camel market, Omdurman, Sudan
[image: p2]
Meroe Pyramids, Sudan
[image: p3]
Young woman leads chants in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Egypt
[image: p4]
Poster in Cairo’s Tahrir Square depicts Mubarak’s cabinet with vampire teeth
[image: p5]
Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters in Tahrir Square gutted by fire
[image: p6]
Avenue Habib Bourguiba, Tunis
[image: p7]
A woman walking down a street in Kairouan, Tunisia
[image: p8]
Great Mosque of Kairouan, Tunisia
[image: p9]
Palmyra, Syria
[image: p10]
Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria
[image: p11]
Sky visiting Mosque of Sayyidah Zainab, in south-east Damascus, Syria.
(Photo by Colonel Raad)
[image: p12]
President Bashar al-Assad speaks with US Ambassador Robert Ford, following his presentation of his credentials in January 2011
(Photo by the office of the Syrian presidency)
[image: p13]
US Ambassador Robert Ford, Sky and US Public Affairs Officer Bryce Isham drinking tea in an art gallery in the old city of Damascus
[image: p14]
Sky and Dr Basima Jadiri in a café in the Green Zone, Baghdad
[image: p15]
Sky pretending to shoot fish with a 9mm pistol in the Mesopotamian Marshes, Iraq
(Photo by Safa al-Sheikh)
[image: p16]
The Mesopotamian Marshes, Iraq
[image: p17]
Deera Square, Riyadh
[image: p18]
Masmak Fort, Riyadh
[image: p19]
Sky in Diriyah, an old neighbourhood of Riyadh
[image: p20]
McDonalds in Panorama Mall, Riyadh
[image: p21]
Old men in oasis of Niswa, Oman
[image: p22]
Women in Ibri market
[image: p23]
Royal Opera House, Muscat
[image: p24]
Qandil mountains, Kurdistan
[image: p25]
Sky discussing the teachings of Öcalan with female PKK guerrilla in the Qandil mountains
[image: p26]
PKK checkpoint to enter the Qandil mountains
[image: p27]
Sky with Iraqi leaders Barham Salih and Adel Abdul Mahdi in Mergapan, Kurdistan
[image: p28]
Amanj Yarwaessi and Sky north of Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan
[image: p29]
Sky in Fairy Tale Canyon on southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kol, Kyrgyzstan
[image: p30]
Horse exhausted after long ride in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan
[image: p31]
Yurt in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan
[image: p32]
The Registan of Samarkand, Uzbekistan
[image: p33]
Ship cemetery in the Aral Sea, Uzbekistan
[image: p34]
Idomeni transit camp near the Greece-Macedonia border
[image: p35]
Poster welcoming refugees in Skopje, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
[image: p36]
Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina
[image: p37]
Celebration of the life of murdered British Member of Parliament Jo Cox in London’s Trafalgar Square on 22 June 2016
[image: p38]
Outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre near Parliament Square in London on 6 July 2016, awaiting the publication of the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War
[image: p39]
Wild horses in the Pyrenees, France
[image: p40]
Signpost marking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, Spain
CHAPTER 4
They are all thieves
Iraq
June 2011
The sky was full of sand and visibility was poor. But out of the aeroplane window I could make out the Euphrates below. Land of the two rivers. I was coming back.
It had been nine months since General Odierno had given up command of US forces in Iraq, and I, his political adviser, had left the country with him. I convinced myself that I was returning to see how the Arab Spring was influencing Iraq. But in truth, not a day went by without me thinking about Iraq. I missed it so much. I missed the people; I missed the sense of purpose I had felt there, the feeling that I could make a difference.
I did not have an Iraqi visa. Visas issued in Iraqi embassies abroad were not recognized by Baghdad Airport. But what I did have was a letter from an Iraqi general in the Ministry of Interior, complete with a signature and stamp. At the airport, I presented my passport and letter, filled out a form, paid $80 and received a visa within fifteen minutes. I collected my bag. I was through.
I immediately spotted Aqil. We grinned at each other as we shook hands. Soon we were in his car speeding down the airport road – dubbed ‘Route Irish’ by the US military – towards the heavily protected Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad. I could not see any Americans. Not on the roads, not at the checkpoints. The US forces had nearly all withdrawn. What was new? I asked Aqil. What had changed?
‘The situation is not good,’ he told me. ‘The government is bad. Too many assassinations.’
Aqil, a fixer who used to ‘smuggle’ me out of the heavily fortified Green Zone when I worked there and was supposed to only travel with official US security, was now ‘smuggling’ me back in as a tourist. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said, smiling and patting his heart with his right hand. Before long, we were through the checkpoints.
I was soon sitting with General Nasier Abadi in his home. He was a fighter pilot and the vice chief of staff of the Iraqi joint forces. I caught up on the news of his immediate and extended family, many of whom I had met at parties at his house. His grandfather, a former Iraqi prime minister, had married off his three daughters to a Sunni, a Shia and a Turkmen respectively, so Nasier had relatives of all persuasions.
I took a dip in Nasier’s pool for respite from the forty-degree heat. The brown of the sand-filled sky was broken by flashes of grey, white and yellow lightning. Later in the evening, the rolls of thunder were replaced by the thuds of mortars targeting the US embassy down the road.
*
The next day, General Nasier instructed two young Iraqi army officers to drive me south to his farm on the Euphrates. I sat in the back seat wearing an abaya and a hijab, chatting to the two officers in the front. The young men told me they were both from Baghdad and were Shia. In the 2010 national elections, the year before, one had voted for Nuri al-Maliki to remain prime minister, but the other had voted for Ayad Allawi as he wanted a secular man to lead Iraq.
The officers both agreed that life had been better under Saddam: there had been more security, people could travel anywhere safely, petrol was cheaper, salaries went further, and there was no Sunni/Shia differentiation. They told me that people were very upset with poor public services, especially electricity, but were too scared to demonstrate. No one liked living under occupation – but people were also worried that the situation might deteriorate if and when all the Americans left.
We drove south for an hour, passing numerous checkpoints. No one checked my papers; my Islamic dress made me invisible. It was late, so the roads were not busy. Finally, we turned off the main road, down a track, through an orchard, and arrived at the house by the Euphrates. There I was met by Nasier’s son, Saad, and he introduced me to his companions. Tables were arranged, and big trays of fattoush salad and maqluba (chicken and rice) were brought out from the house.
As we ate, Saad spoke about his experiences working with the US military. ‘They have big hearts,’ he told me, ‘but they are naive. They don’t know how to do contracting. They spent lots of money, but so much was wasted. They did not
know who was good and who was bad. Many projects were not implemented well. Others were not sustainable. The Brits last century left us with railways, roads and bridges. What have the Americans left us?’
I asked Saad’s friends about themselves. I discovered that one woman was a Kurd who was born and bred in Baghdad, two were Sunnis and the others were Shia, and all had relatives of different sects. ‘We are Iraqis,’ they told me firmly, one after the other. They had known each other for years.
It was midnight. I lay back on the large swing chair on the bank of the river, wrapped myself up in a blanket and fell asleep. But my peace was rudely interrupted around 2 a.m. by a massive explosion which shook the ground. For a moment, I wondered if we were being attacked. Then I speculated that perhaps there were still some Americans on a nearby base. I did not move, and quickly fell back to sleep.
I awoke again around 5 a.m. when the sun rose, and placed a shirt over my eyes. I dozed until the heat of the sun became too much. The caretaker brought me tea. He told me he had also slept outside, guarding me through the night, making sure I was safe and keeping away the dogs – which looked like wolves. I thanked him.
He squatted down beside me to chat. ‘The Americans had bases here,’ he said. ‘Our people attacked them. Gangs. The Americans did not know who was good and who bad.’ He told me how, one time, he had been up a palm tree picking dates when Americans shot at him. He giggled as he recounted how he had fallen out of the tree. Another time, he had approached an American checkpoint and they demanded he take off his
top, then his trousers, then his underwear. They made him walk stark naked. On another occasion, he thought a gang was breaking into the plantation so he opened fire. In fact, it was a group of American soldiers and he wounded one. The Americans arrested him and sent him to Bucca prison camp, near Basra.
I asked the caretaker how his life was these days. He told me he only had a few hours of electricity a day at home − it came on for one hour and then went off for four hours. During the hour that it was on, he ran the air conditioner to make his room as cold as possible. It was very difficult for people, he said. They slept out on the roofs. He spoke about the ‘time of the British’, the ‘time of Saddam’, and the ‘time of the Americans’. He had already consigned the American period to history.
Later, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, I climbed up on the jet ski that belonged to Saad and sped up the Euphrates. Normally, I would never go on a jet ski. They were noisy beasts that disturbed any sense of tranquillity. But this time I made an exception. I had never seen jet skis in Iraq before and it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. The dust of the previous day had cleared and the sky was a brilliant blue.
I waved to people on the banks and they waved back. I passed the Iskandriya power station that had once served as a US base. Further up on the left was Jurf al-Sakhar. The Americans used to call this area the ‘triangle of death’ because of the levels of violence. I remembered landing by helicopter on numerous occasions on visits to the troops, receiving briefings about insurgents moving down the river and about the efforts to
clear the area. Now it was just me on the river. The insurgents had been defeated and the US bases had gone.
I jumped off the jet ski into the water and swam alongside it back down the river, floating with the current. These days, there were no dead bodies bobbing in the water, there was no stench of death. I could not wait to describe all of this to my friends in the US military.
Out the back of the house, surrounded by sheep and chickens, the caretaker was busy barbequing a fish that a fisherman brought for us that morning. Saad had gutted it earlier, washing it in the river and then butterflying it to put under the grill. One of the women placed the masgouf on a tray and brought it out to the table on the riverbank. We ate standing up, pulling off bits of the fish with our fingers and scooping up salads with freshly baked bread. It was delicious.
*
Back in Baghdad, Krikor Derhagopian, an adviser to Vice President Tareq al-Hashimi, invited me to his home for lunch. His family lived in a part of Baghdad that used to be a Jewish area. The 1917 census put the Jewish population of Baghdad at 40 per cent. But the position of this established community, which contributed considerably to the economic and cultural life of the country, deteriorated rapidly following the establishment of the state of Israel. Around 118,000 Jews left Iraq in the 1950s, with just 6,000 choosing to stay. Today, only a handful remain of a community that can trace its origins back to the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 587 BC.
Krikor’s Armenian family had bought the house in 1954. The tapestries, rifles and photos on the walls were mementos of the bygone era of the monarchy. Krikor’s great-grandfather had been such a supporter of the royal family that when he heard they had all been brutally murdered in 1958, he fell down the stairs to his death.
Against a long wall, shelves were crammed with books. Krikor lived here with his wife and son and his parents. His mother, an elegant, well-dressed woman, told me of how the Armenians escaped to Iraq as refugees from the genocide in Turkey. Many Armenians were taken in by Arab tribes around Mosul. ‘The Arabs were so kind and generous to us, bringing up orphans as their own children. We will always remember how good they were to us.’ Then she added: ‘But we will never forgive Turkey.’
Christians have been living in Iraq since the first century, but their numbers started to decline under sanctions in the 1990s. At the outbreak of the 2003 war, the number of Christians (Chaldean, Assyrian, Syriac and Armenian; Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant) was estimated at 1.5 million. Membership of the myriad Christian communities had since gone down to under 450,000.
Krikor’s mother lamented that Iraq was on the way to losing all its Christians. So many were leaving for the US. ‘What will they find there? Life might be easier, but here in Iraq is where we have our families, our history, our culture.’ She sighed, and told me that everyone had had such high hopes after the fall of the regime. No one had expected it to turn out this way. But even in her most depressed moments, she never wished Saddam back.
Krikor’s wife had cooked a feast of Armenian foods and I sampled every plate. As I departed, she gave me a bag of leftovers that would feed Nasier’s family for days.
As Krikor drove me back across town, we heard on the radio of an attack on the provincial council in Diyala that had left eight killed and over twenty wounded; an Iraqi general had also been assassinated in Baghdad.
*
One evening, Safa al-Sheikh, the deputy national security adviser, took me on a tour of Baghdad. He was an old friend who had taught me much about the country over the years. Erudite and learned, he had become religious as a young man, had joined the underground Shia Islamic Dawa Party, and while serving in the air force had also been a member of the Baath Party. Iraqis were skilled at hedging their bets. He had two wives: one Sunni, one Shia.
Baghdad had once flourished as the cultural capital of the Islamic world. It was here that Caliph Harun al-Rashid established the House of Wisdom, which served as a library, a translation institute and an academy, bringing together scholars from across the Muslim world. For five hundred years, the city was the centre of the Abbasid Caliphate (the third caliphate to succeed the Prophet Mohamad). But all that was destroyed in the thirteenth century, when Mongol hordes sacked the city. Led by Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, they attacked Baghdad in 1258. Up to a million of its residents were massacred, and the caliph was murdered. Great architecture – built over centuries – was razed to the ground. Ancient systems of irrigation were demolished.
Baghdad’s libraries, the repository of knowledge from the Islamic golden age, were destroyed. The waters of the Tigris were said to have run black with the ink from all the books.
British general Sir Stanley Maude, when he marched into Baghdad in 1917, proclaimed to the inhabitants that ‘our armies do not come to your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’ He noted that since the time of Hulagu ‘your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation.’ Under the monarchy, which the British introduced and mentored, Iraq’s fortunes improved for a while. But the royals were murdered in the 1950s. And, since then, the city had been subjected to years of wars and sanctions.
When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush promised a new era of freedom and democracy. What followed were years of anarchy and occupation. The country descended into civil war; and hundreds of thousands were killed before it was brought under control.
Safa and I visited the neighbourhoods where fighting had once consumed the city and ethnic cleansing had shattered a previously cosmopolitan society. These were familiar haunts. I could clearly observe the changes that had taken place over the last year. The local economy had improved. The private sector was taking off. More shops were open. New cars were on the roads. People were busy going about their everyday affairs. Many of the high concrete walls, which had separated communities from each other, had been removed.
But despite the relative calm, Safa was concerned about ‘the
direction of the political process, corruption and assassinations’. In methodical fashion, we discussed the different trajectories Iraq might take: dictatorship under Maliki, who as well as being prime minister also served as Minister of Defence, Interior and National Security; a Russian-style oligarchy, with the kleptocratic political class living in comfort in the Green Zone, dividing up the country’s oil revenues between them while the general population still lacked basic services; a war between the haves and have nots, with armed groups fighting the State for a share of the country’s oil resources, as in Nigeria; or a return to sectarian conflict. Although the parliament was growing in capacity, and there were different media channels, the sectarian construct of the political system, the structure of the economy, and corruption hindered progress towards democracy, he said.
I asked Safa whether he believed US forces would remain in Iraq after the security agreement expired at the end of 2011. The Obama administration had spoken of keeping a small contingent – 5,000 or so – but did not appear to be doing the heavy lifting required to gain a new agreement. I had heard a couple of US officials claim that Maliki had assured them he intended to keep some US soldiers in Iraq.
Safa gave me a wry smile. Was this what Maliki had actually told the Americans, he asked, or what they wanted to believe? We both suspected it might be the latter. In 2010, to gain Iranian and Sadrist support for a second term as prime minister after he had failed to win the most seats in the elections, Maliki had committed to not extending the presence of US forces after 2011. He wanted to take credit for the departure of all
American troops. His party, Dawa, had recently put out a statement reiterating its ‘firm stand toward the withdrawal of all the US forces from the Iraqi land, waters, and airspace at the set time, which is the end of this year’.
Our discussion went on for hours in the car as we drove around Baghdad.
Just like in the old days.
*
Dr Basima Jadiri and I met up in a café in the Green Zone. It was a grotty place – but there was limited choice. We reminisced about 2007 and how we had worked together closely to help bring down the violence that ravaged the country – she as the military adviser to Prime Minister Maliki, and me as the political adviser to General Odierno, the operational commander of US forces in Iraq. It seemed such a long time ago.
We discussed the problems facing the country today. How much longer would the patience of Iraqis continue, I asked her. She told me that people were tired. ‘They want electricity and jobs. They want to eat and sleep. They want normal lives.’ She went on: ‘There is injustice. The country is rich, but the people do not see the benefits. The Iraqi people have been so oppressed for years that we are like sheep. Iraq today is so far away from the vision that people had after the fall of Saddam.’
I described to Basima my trips to Egypt and Tunisia, and how people felt empowered because they had removed the regimes themselves and with little bloodshed. They were debating their constitutions, and new politicians were coming to the fore to compete in elections.
Basima told me that, in Iraq, people did not feel that same sense of empowerment. They had not removed Saddam themselves. It was America who had put the current crop of politicians in power – many of whom were Islamists who had returned from exile abroad and were different from Iraqis who had remained in the country under Saddam. There had been no public debate in Iraq over the constitution. Many blamed the Americans for introducing sectarian and ethnic quotas – muhasasa – throughout the system of government in Iraq. And while Iraqi politicians claimed they did not want muhasasa, they maintained the quota system – and most political parties were sectarian or ethnic-based.
Iraq’s political leaders were not helping the country heal. They had not come to a consensus on the nature of the state. They did little to promote reconciliation or an inclusive national identity to which all Iraqis could relate. Instead, they stirred fear of the ‘other’, instrumentalizing sects to mobilize support for themselves. And elections had not brought about change – instead they had kept the same politicians and the same dysfunctional system in place.
Iraq was evidence that the removal of an authoritarian regime did not necessarily lead to better governance. The gap between the political elite and the Iraqi people seemed to be growing even wider. Iraq’s politicians were frequently derided as corrupt. Basima, who had lived her whole life in Iraq, quoted a common Iraqi refrain: ‘Before we had one Saddam; now we have hundreds.’ Without pausing, she concluded: ‘They are all thieves.’
*
One Friday afternoon, I watched the government TV channel. It showed the Cabinet discussing progress in their ministries, development projects across the country, beautiful scenery and happy members of the public out shopping. I switched to Al Sharqiya. It criticized the government for lack of progress, highlighted electricity shortages across the country and the paltry number of hours received daily from the national grid, and provided details of the brutality of Iraqi security forces. I went back to the government channel and watched coverage of Iraqis gathering to demonstrate in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. I was initially confused, as the demonstrations looked nothing like those I had seen elsewhere in the region. The protestors carried placards with a red ‘X’ through a photo of Ayad Allawi, the leader of the party that had won the most seats in the 2010 elections but which had been blocked from trying to form the government. Sheikhs were shown demanding the death penalty for terrorists.
That evening, over dinner in a restaurant in Karrada in downtown Baghdad, some Western journalists told me they had been in the square that afternoon. They explained that the demonstrators had been ‘pro-government’ supporters bused in from Karbala, as well as Green Zone security guards who had been sent there to express their support for Maliki. The journalists had witnessed a small group of ‘pro-democracy’ protestors demanding more freedoms, an end to corruption and better public services. Government officials had accused them of being Baathists and terrorists. They were beaten up by plain-clothed men with batons – while the security forces stood by watching. And two, one of whom was a woman, were stabbed.
As we ate pizza and drank wine, an Iraqi singer entertained us with Bee Gees songs. The man sang with such passion, making the songs his own. When he finished, I invited him over to join us at our table. He sat down, and as he spoke, the talented, confident performer transformed into a fragile, damaged man. What was the trauma he was struggling with?
He told us that he had visited the United States for a short period in the seventies when